Gabby

After examining the mythology of “primitive” societies in his previous volume, here Joseph Campbell turns his examination of mythology to the East, the Orient. He begins with ancient Egypt, before devoting the bulk of his text to the development of various movements (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) in India, concluding with relatively short chapters on China, Japan, and Tibet.

Egypt being included in this volume, while the Middle East is included in the succeeding volume on occidental mythology, shows that Campbell is not above glossing over the finer details in pursuit of making the case he wants to make. In this case, the second volume of Masks of God is where Campbell begins to make his argument that Eastern religion drives its adherents to turn away from the world, accepting one's place in the social strata while seeking to end the cycle of death and rebirth by detachment. That Campbell thinks Western religion drives its adherents to focus on what they can achieve with their single life, and is therefore ultimately superior to Eastern religion, isn't laid on super thick but is definitely obvious.

But what we get through that sometimes distasteful bent is a well-researched and interesting examination of the development of Eastern religion. The largest portion of the text is devoted to Buddhism and reading about how it developed, grew in India, and then was pushed out to China, Japan, and Tibet (with mutations in each culture that reflect its unique perspective) is genuinely compelling. The chapter regarding Tibet does not shy away from the atrocities committed against the monks there by the Chinese, but one of Campbell's strengths is that he's not afraid to be critical. He certainly has no problem puncturing the ideals that religions would like you to believe about them by discussing the historical realities of how they actually functioned.

There is a similar psychoanalytic frame of reference here as in the first volume, but it's not as prominent (probably because there's more substance here to work from than there was with the first) and so it's not as problematic. Indeed, this volume is superior to the first all around. It's still thick, and fact-dense, and reads like a textbook, but Oriental Mythology is a more rewarding read, both in information and readability (it's still very slow, though) than its antecedent.

Spies, in the movies, are usually presented as dangerous and/or sexy. Reality, of course, is always less glamorous, and Douglas C. Waller's Wild Bill Donovan tells the story of America's first real spymaster. Bill Donovan headed up the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor body for the Central Intelligence Agency. The book bills itself as a biography, but that's not strictly true...it's as much a story about the OSS as it is about Donovan himself. A Medal of Honor and Purple Heart winner for his military service in World War I, the Republican Donovan was tapped by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Coordinator Of Information in the buildup to World War II to make sure that the various military intelligence services and the FBI were sharing information. Eventually Donovan expanded that role into his own agency, the OSS, that engaged in espionage and spy missions across Europe and Asia during the war years. It was briefly shuttered after the war, but a proposal Donovan had made beforehand to keep it running afterwards as the Cold War loomed eventually resulted in the CIA, which Donovan (much to his displeasure) was not chosen to run.

As you can tell by the low rating, I had significant issues with the book. I'm not all that into spy stories on the page (although I do enjoy them on the screen), and a large portion of the book deals with the spy missions that made up the early days of the OSS. It recounts these missions in what I found to be tedious detail, including agents and their code names and intricate ins-and-outs of how specific missions played out without there ever being much payoff for that kind of information dump. What I was interested in reading was a biography of a person, which only showed up at the beginning and the end. We get through Donovan's first 50 or so years (including a pretty scandalous social life that saw him marry a socialite above his class only to be relentlessly unfaithful...so much so he was accused of having an affair with his own daughter in law!) in about 60 pages. There are some intriguing tidbits about his longtime feud with J. Edgar Hoover, but it's never developed. Then there's the endless boring espionage stuff, and finally we get more insight into Donovan's actual life after the OSS is disbanded, which focused mainly on a final diplomatic posting and then decline into dementia. Through it all, I never got a sense of an actual person. He's constantly described as charismatic and dashing, and while there's definitely a sense of a dynamic person created, I don't feel like I know anything about who Bill Donovan was as a human being. If you have any interest in an actual biography of the man, this is a pass. If you're interested in espionage during World War II, though, you will probably enjoy this book more than I did.

In Dan Cluchey's The Life of the World To Come, Leo Brice is a anxiety-ridden pre-law senior in college when he meets Fiona Haeberle. Fiona is quirky, outgoing, mercurial, an aspiring actress, and she and Leo quickly become a couple. They move to New York for Leo's legal education, she gets a job on a cheesy soap opera that films locally, and they're happy. Or so he thinks. Right after he finishes the bar exam, though, she suddenly leaves him in the middle of the night for her co-star.

Leo is completely devastated, and while he tries to put himself back together, he begins a job with a small firm focusing on death penalty appeals. Leo recovers from his breakup as he gets involved in his case, defending a religious man convicted of an out-of-character murder many years prior...with a young, pretty co-counsel who makes Leo feel like there might actually be a life after Fiona maybe. The client is only a half-hearted participant in his own appeal, and his philosophizing helps Leo get his own life back together.

So, this might sound rambling, but hear me out. When I was in college, Garden State was a super-hyped movie. I like it, but it hasn't aged especially well...a lot of the self-conscious quirk on display has come to feel artificial. And it is, of course, the poster child for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trend that was a big thing around that time. I actually think Natalie Portman's Sam is one of the better-done examples of it, but it got a little irritating for a while there. This is relevant here because this totally feels like a screenplay that was written to be one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies and then became a novel. Despite being so central to the plot, Fiona doesn't really have much of a character. Any insight into who she actually is and what drives her is left for a cringeworthy conversation Leo and Fiona have years after their breakup, in which the now-famous Fiona calls her ex to ask if she was a good girlfriend and he gets the chance to take her down a peg (of course he takes that opportunity). It's not presented as a gross moment for him, but rather as a moment of triumph, and that's just one of the issues with this book.

Besides Leo not really being all that interesting on his own (tightly-wound lawyer gets dumped, gets sad, tries to rebound with a coworker...snore), the book doesn't really seem to have a lot of direction or any real idea of what it's trying to say. Breakups suck? Working on a death penalty case can improve your mental health? It's cool to bang your coworkers if your boss eggs you into it? I'm not necessarily opposed to reading white-dude-navel-gazing if it's done well, but this isn't done well. If reading about a 20something dude mourn the loss of his girlfriend who's more concept than person is something that sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy this book. If not, move along.

Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes had spent several months in close contact with the Hillary Clinton campaign, intending to write a book about how we got our first female president of the United States. Instead, they wrote Shattered, about what went wrong. There isn't a single, easy answer. There were a lot of things, none of which alone would likely have doomed her, but they didn't happen alone: Hilary's own decision-making pre-campaign regarding paid speeches, leaving her vulnerable to the primary challenge from the left she got from Senator Bernie Sanders, the decision to employ Robby Mook as campaign manager and tilt towards his preferred analytics instead of traditional tools like polls and persuasive field efforts, the bloated bureaucracy of Clintonland and infighting among the inner circle, the server, the emails, James Comey, Anthony Weiner, all of it and more happened in overlapping waves. And so, much like that other unsinkable ship, the S.S. Clinton went under.

Allen and Parnes were able to get deep access because they spoke to most of their sources as background, which means lot of the information isn't tied to a particular person. Since you know you won't be identified, you feel comfortable speaking more freely without fear of recrimination for divulging sensitive details. And the details Allen and Parnes got tell quite the story: what seemed like an unstoppable behemoth from the outside was very messy from the inside. Although no one forgot their main enemy was outside, the warring power centers within found plenty of time and energy to skirmish among themselves. Healthy competition between allies can be productive, but this variety was decidedly not. The Clintons themselves were not a part of the solution...from the perspective in the book, they seem largely at a remove from the campaign and disinclined to help clear lines of authority be drawn. Hillary's unwillingness to force Huma Abedin to take a step back from her established role as gatekeeper and be in more direct contact with her own campaign, her refusal to either place all her faith in either the data-driven Mook or old-school politico John Podesta, created a situation in which no one was really at the helm to navigate through very tricky waters indeed.

This book was an especially interesting read for me personally because I know people who worked at a relatively high level on the campaign (at least one of whom is called out by name). While the book focuses strongly on upper-level turmoil, they largely had positive individual experiences. Which helped me keep some of the “doom and gloom” tone that the book seemed to set around the campaign in perspective. Campaigns are messy and stressful and hard. And the way this one was run didn't help ameliorate that. At the end of the day, this book left me wishing that it could have turned out better, because the candidate would have served the office well. I'd recommend this book highly, I thought it was interesting and informative.

Like many people, I remember where I was when I found out that Princess Di had died, and watching the coverage of her funeral. It was a massive spectacle that drew attention from millions worldwide. But it was also a hugely significant event for her own family. Diana's life and death continues to resonate around the British Royal Family, and it is through this prism that Christopher Andersen presents her mother-in-law, romantic rival, and would-have-been daughter-in-law in his book, Game of Crowns. Queen Elizabeth II, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge are all women who either are or could be queens of England, and all of them are touched by the legacy of the People's Princess.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Andersen spends so much time talking about the ill-fated marriage between Charles and Diana. At least one third of the book is devoted to the story of their courtship, their terrible marriage, and their contentious divorce. On the other hand, though, the “War of the Waleses” is an already extensively documented phenomenon. There's no real new reporting here: they barely knew each other when they got married, they both cheated (though Diana at least went into her marriage without an active side piece), they both orchestrated media to lash out against the other, and they were both active, engaged parents. Her death and the near-constitutional crisis that the response to it engendered had a real impact on the monarchy. And his reporting of William and Kate's courtship isn't really much better, in terms of doing more than just summarizing already-available information: lingerie on the catwalk, the break-up, the make-up, the wedding.

What is new is gossip, nearly all of it negative, about Charles and Camilla, with special venom reserved for the latter. He begins the book with a lengthy “what could happen” riff about the ascension of Charles to the throne when his mother dies, predicting that his vanity and hubris will lead to the abolition of the monarchy. While Diana's leaks to the press are treated a part of her savvy media strategy, leaks from Charles and/or Camilla are portrayed as sneaky, underhanded, and devious. Camilla is depicted as scheming and manipulative, and set against Kate, who's given a Diana-esque sheen of being both glamorous and naturally gifted at connection with strangers (without any actual supporting evidence). I checked out of the book entirely when Andersen breathlessly related that Camilla had “leaked” information about Kate's low tally of “engagements”, the kind of meet-and-greets and ribbon-cuttings that make up royal work. The reality is that the Royal Family publishes engagements in the easily-publicly-accessible Court Circular, and a year-end tally is common practice for journalists covering the royal beat. Camilla wouldn't have had to leak anything to anyone to “shame” Kate for lackluster numbers because that information would have been published anyways! A failure to understand something as basic as this shows the whole book to be without rooting in fact. It's basically a very long, poorly fact-checked People article and I don't recommend it.

Louis Grumet's The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel tells the inside story of one of the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause cases: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet. That's the same Grumet in both places: he was the president of the New York State School Boards Association at the time a law was passed in the New York State Legislature creating a school district for a small village in upstate New York that was home exclusively to the Satmar, a sect of strict Hasidic Jews. The Satmar, a community that previously lived in Brooklyn but found the modern world to be too intrusive in the middle of New York City, bought up large chunks of land outside a town called Monroe and founded a village that they called Kiryas Joel after their leader, a rabbi who had survived the Holocaust. They shunned contact with the outside, established their own private yeshivas to educate their children, and caused a lot of strife within the larger Monroe community by doing things like blatantly ignoring building codes with impunity, crying anti-Semitism anytime they were challenged. The issue arose because, like any small group that intermarries extensively, there came to be many children with genetic disorders and resultant learning disabilities. The Satmar were not equipped to educate these children, so they sought to take advantage of the legal obligation of the Monroe school district to provide appropriate education to the local children and sent their kids to public school. It did not go well: the children, who already had special needs, struggled in a radically different environment and the district made several problematic blunders. The Satmar kids were pulled out of the district, and an idea was hatched: to give the village its own district, which would be able to take in and spend public money for the education of these children.

That's a problem under the Establishment Clause, because the law was designed to benefit and was exclusive to one particular religious group. So why would this bill have even been drafted? And then passed? And then signed? The answer: politics! The Satmar are a relatively small group, but they're powerful: they vote as a bloc the way their rabbi tells them to...and they don't have an ideological purity test to pass. They support whoever helps steer money and services to them. Politicians like winning elections, and so they're willing to do what they can to lock down those votes. Grumet was there as it all was happening, and guides the reader through the process: fleshing out the details of who the Satmar are, how they came to settle at Kiryas Joel, their conflicts with the local population, why sending their kids to public school failed, and how the bill came to be conceived and passed.

A lot of the political behind-the-scenes stuff was familiar and understandable to me as someone who does this kind of thing for a living, but if that's not you, Grumet lays it out in a way that's logical and easy to follow. I think a lot of people don't quite understand how the sausage is made (I know I didn't before I started doing what I do), and the way Grumet tells the story helps shed light on the process. He also helps illuminate what it actually means to take a case to the Supreme Court: it starts small, with a lawsuit in district court, and goes up from there. The court portion of the book is actually the weakest part...it mostly copies and pastes sections of transcripts to show the arguments made and the decisions reached.

At the end of the day, this book is almost certain to only be interesting to those already inclined to enjoy the subject matter. Some broader context is provided, but the story is almost entirely about this situation and case and doesn't go out of its way to make it easy to understand the legal issues if you're a layperson. It's not especially well-written, and suffers for Grumet's insistence on telling his own story as much as the case's story. It's not a bad book per se, but it isn't one I'd recommend to anyone but people with some already existing background and interest in the subject matter.

The action in Thirst is kicked off by something not so prosaic as a drought. Rather, the fresh water simply vanishes. The grid goes down, as does the network, and emergency services are so overwhelmed that they can't respond to the crash causing the enormous traffic snarl Eddie Chapman finds himself in. He doesn't know about the water yet. Frustrated at the delay, close to home, and wanting to avoid worrying his anxious wife, Laura, he leaves his car behind and jogs back to his house. On the way there, he notices that the stream he crosses is dry, the trees around it singed and ashy. And thus Eddie, Laura, and their suburban neighbors find themselves in an awful bind: unable to communicate with anyone besides the people they're in physical proximity to, no access to news or information, and no water during the steamy summer weather. How everyone deals with the circumstances they find themselves in is really what the book is about. How do you provide for yourself? Your neighbors? Strangers? The initial panic, the dwindling supply of liquids, the delirium as the dehydration kicks in...the pretense of civilization vanishes quickly.

This novel read, to me, of a mix of two books I've read recently: Jose Saramago's Blindness (which I loved), and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (which I hated). Like Blindness, the story follows a group of people cut off from the outside world in a place where rules and the social ties that bind are disintegrating after a catastrophic event. Like Hunger, the inability to meet basic needs of physical survival cause the characters to become delusional and therefore unreliable narrators. Thirst is better than Hunger, but not nearly as good as Blindness. The plot took a while to start moving, and I felt like it ultimately wrapped up a little too quickly. Less exposition at the beginning, more denouement at the end would have made it stronger. But it's engaging, and once I got into the thick of it I was intrigued and wanted to know what happened next. It's pretty quick to get through, and I enjoyed it. I'd recommend it to a friend interested in post-apocalyptic style literature, but don't think I'll end up re-reading it myself.

Michael Lowenthal's Charity Girl explores a “hidden” aspect of US history. His novel follows Freida, a teenager who flees from her Russian Jewish immigrant mother after her father dies and she's about to be sold (literally) in marriage to a much older man she barely knows. She goes to Boston, where she gets a job in a department store and makes friends with her coworkers. She meets Felix, a dashing young soldier who sends her heart a-flutter...but leaves her with syphilis before he reports for training to head overseas to fight in World War I. She's tracked down by the Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps, and even though she tries to get away, she's eventually picked up and sent to a reform facility.

She's committed no crime, but neither she or the other girls she's detained with (some prostitutes, some, like Freida, “charity girls” who don't sell their bodies but have offered their company to men who take them out) are sophisticated enough players to work the system. While there, the girls are treated for their STDs (this is the pre-antibiotic era, so those treatments are on the harsh side), as well as proselytized to about leaving behind their “scandalous” ways. There is a social worker who offers her help to Freida, and she never loses hope that Felix does care for her and will effectuate her release. She does eventually leave the home, but I'll leave the how for anyone who wants to read to discover.

Let's start with the good things about this book. First of all, it introduced me to a part of American history I'd never even heard of. That the military members who were as often as not the source of the diseases the girls had were able to get treatment and move on with their lives while the women were subjected to indefinite detention (sometimes followed by criminal prosecution)...is, honestly, not all that surprising, unfortunately. But it was definitely something entirely new to me, and I'm glad I read it and found out more. I actually thought Lowenthal did a fairly good job with Freida's characterization (she's kind of wishy-washy and prone to flights of fantasy, but she's a 17 year-old girl who was sheltered for most of her life), and I appreciated that he surrounded her with a relatively diverse cast of characters.

But it wasn't really a very good book at the end of the day. Frieda might have been a well-drawn character, but as a protagonist, she was more irritating than not. The other girls she lived with might have been diverse, but they were all pretty flat. As soon as you find out than one of them is pregnant, it's obvious that there's going to be a botched abortion, because along with the helpful social worker turning out to be a predatory lesbian (yikes) who turns her back on Freida when she discovers that she's still infatuated with Felix, that's just the kind of story this is. I never really felt like the stakes were that high or got invested in the story. The writing is fine, but unspectacular. Unless you have a particular interest in this time period, I'd say that this is skippable.

In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the Supreme Court in a very divided opinion struck down death penalty statutes all over the country, citing arbitrariness and racism in determining which defendants were subjected to it. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court reversed itself and allowed the death penalty to resume. The first person to be executed after Gregg was a man in Utah named Gary Gilmore. In The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer tells the story of how that came to be.

It's not actually all that complicated. Although he was quite bright, Gary had an unstable childhood and started getting into trouble young, stealing cars and getting sent first to juvie and then real jail. At 22, he was imprisoned for armed robbery and after spending 14 years on the inside, he was eventually paroled and went to Utah to live with a cousin. Although his family and new community genuinely tried to help him, Gary had a hard time adjusting to life in the real world...until he met Nicole Baker. Nicole had a troubled history of her own, including commitment to a mental health facility and two divorces (along with two children) at the age of 19. Their relationship was intense but turbulent, and their breakup left Gary spiraling out of control. He shot and killed both a gas station attendant and a hotel clerk, and was caught, tried, and sentenced to death in relatively short order. When the sentence was pronounced, Gary decided not to fight it...he went through lawyers until he found one that would honor his decision to not appeal and let the penalty be carried out. Although a few appeals were undertaken on his behalf, much to his fury, he was ultimately executed by firing squad on January 17, 1977.

Out of this, Mailer spins a 1000+ page epic. And there's probably an incredible 500-600 page book inside of it somewhere, but boy howdy was this in screaming need of a firm editor. The book is divided into two roughly equal sections...the first ends with Gary's sentence, and the second not too long after his execution. Both portions drag for extended periods. Although Mailer's prose style is interesting and engaging, his determination to include everything he uncovered in his clearly very extensive research weighs down the narrative. The book takes a couple hundred pages to get to the point where the murders happen...which are then over, along with the trial, in about fifty. The back half of the book is dedicated as much to the wheelings and dealings of Hollywood players trying to get the rights to Gary's story as it is to Gary's actual story, and though there's a statement in there about how Gary pretty much stopped being a person and started being a commodity from that point forward, it's honestly just not that compelling. I never had any emotional investment in the relationship between Lawrence Schilling and his girlfriend, although from the attention Mailer paid to it you would think it's an important component of the proceedings. The book finishes strong by recounting Gary's last hours, death, and the immediate fallout on his loved ones, but there had been so many bumps in the road along the way that I was mostly just glad it was over. You have to admire its ambition and scope, but the actual product is very uneven. It's worth reading, if you're interested in this kind of thing, but not a must-read by any stretch.

Small, dying towns have a way of scraping along far past what it seems like their expiration dates should be, a stubborn romanticism cementing their residents in place. Like Thalia, the fictional Texas town where Larry McMurtry sets The Last Picture Show. Oil keeps Thalia together, provides roughnecking jobs for the local working class boys, and keeps the town's wealthiest family, the Farrows, in their relatively cushioned niche. Gene and Lois Farrow's spoiled, beautiful teenage daughter Jacy is the apple of every boy's eye and when the story starts, she's chosen her blue-collar classmate Duane as her boyfriend. She doesn't really have especially strong feelings for Duane, but she likes that he's in the backfield on the football team and that he adores her and buys her things. That he's poor enough to piss off her parents is icing on the cake.

But the book isn't really about Duane. It's sort of about Jacy, but it's really about Sonny, Duane's best friend, and their senior year in high school. Sonny is just kind of drifting along without much direction, being mediocre at sports and crushing on his best friend's girl, until he finds himself in an affair with Ruth, the football coach's neglected wife. He's thrilled to be getting laid regularly and fond of Ruth, but their affair triggers something deeper for her. Stuck in a bad marriage she made to rebel against her parents, she feels seen and desired for the first time in her adult life, giving her back some of her dampened inner fire but also making her heart-wrenchingly dependent on the attention of a teenage boy. And when Jacy sets her sights on Sonny, well...heartbreak is in order.

One of the things that struck me particularly about this novel was the lack of romance in the way that McMurtry dealt with sex. The experience of sex for the characters ranges from the purely transactional (both Sonny and Duane sleep with hookers) to the deeply meaningful (the way that Ruth views her assignations with Sonny). It felt more honest than either treating it consistently as either a purely physical exercise or A Mystical Union Of Two Souls. There's even a range of feeling about sex within the characters themselves: for example, Jacy sleeps with the besotted Duane as a means to an end of losing her virginity to be more attractive to another man and coolly leaves him shortly thereafter, but she's genuinely hurt when she has sex with the local pool hustler because she feels real desire for the first time in her life and it turns out she's just a a way he's acting out towards his own lover. It hits on the way that sex actually works in real life, with a wide spectrum of meaning depending on the content, and it's just part of why the novel rings so true and so real.

Sonny's not a bad guy, despite his sometimes cavalier treatment of Ruth's feelings. He's just young and is still feeling his way into becoming an adult. Which is pretty much everyone's situation, including the adults themselves...it's the rare coming-of-age story that doesn't neglect the older generation. The idea that we're all just trying to figure out how to be a grown-up is what gives the novel its power. I loved this book and the way it took you inside the character's heads (mostly Sonny, Jacy, and Ruth, but a few others) and let you see situations and other characters from different perspectives. It creates a sense of people, not just characters, on the page. It felt like a tour of loneliness, in a way: everyone in the story is lonely and trying to deal with that loneliness in their own way. Everyone's grasping at something they think will help that seems tantalizingly just out of reach. Which isn't just small-town life, to be certain, but cities seem to have more to offer to distract from that emptiness. The people of Thalia, though, just have their aching hearts. It's not a long book, but I found it so compelling that I blasted right through it. Simple but vivid prose and emotionally honest characters made it hard to put down.

Even if I never get to go back, I've been able to travel to Tuscany (Florence, specifically), and that makes me incredibly lucky. But it's one level of privilege to be able to visit briefly. It's a whole other level to be able to buy property over there and actually live there for parts of the year. But what some of us can only dream of, others are able to make happen and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun recounts her experiences buying and renovating a farmhouse in Cortona, Italy, and the first years she spent with it as her Christmas and summer home.

First things first: the movie (which I've never seen) is apparently not a strict adaptation of the book. While in both cases Frances' divorce from an apparently very wealthy man (she mentions it only vaguely in the book) is what enables her to purchase the home, the movie apparently gives her a hot new Italian man to mend her broken heart. In reality/the book, she is already happily remarried by the time she decides to start looking for a summer home in Italy. Let me stress that again: they have the means to start searching for a summer home in ITALY. If rich white people doing home renovation, eating food, and contemplating their navels is not your deal, this book will not be for you. I've seen rather a lot of negative reviews focused on the premise that the book is not like the movie and/or annoyed that it's about nothing more than wealthy people doing construction and eating.

There are reasons I found the book to be a mixed bag (hence the very middle of the road rating), but they don't have anything to do with either the lack of romance or the privilege. Well, sort of the latter, I guess, because my biggest beef with the book is that there isn't really any conflict. Story structure has remained remarkably consistent over recorded history, which means there are clearly elements that are naturally appealing to people when they're taking in a tale. One of the fundamental pieces of a story is conflict: we want to see our protagonists struggle with obstacles. Frances...doesn't, really. She obliquely mentions that things are expensive, but there's never any indication she has to scrimp or save or go without in order to afford them. She and her husband do a lot of DIY to fix the place up, but the impression is that they enjoy doing it, and don't need to do it for money's sake. It all just seems to roll along...they find the house, they buy it, they do gradual repairs, they start spending a lot of time there, they make new friends, and they're happy. Which must be lovely to experience, but pretty boring to read about.

What saves it from being a total snooze is the writing. Mayes is a poet, and it shows. It's beautifully written, and the way she writes lets you see with your mind's eye the lawn at Bramasole with the bright yellow table she had painted, loaded with fresh and simple but delicious food, looking out on the olive trees and flowers and rolling hills. There's an enjoyable element of wish fulfillment fantasy...very very few people will ever get to live the kind of dreamy life she shows us (I have no doubt there were and are less wonderful elements behind the scenes, but she doesn't go into them), so it gives us a window into what seems like an incredible experience. But I had trouble focusing on it because I was honestly mostly bored after about the first 100 pages or so.

In Willa Cather's novel My Antonia, Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Schimerda, the dearest friend of his youth. They arrive in rural Nebraska on the same train: orphaned ten year-old Jim going to live with his grandparents, fourteen year-old Antonia as part of her immigrant Bohemian (Czech) family. They tread similar but not identical tracks...while Jim's family is prosperous and steady, the Schimerdas quickly find themselves mired in poverty and struggle to make ends meet. But they live close to each other (by pioneer standards, anyways) and the two become close. Even when the Burdens move into town, Antonia's there before long, as a “hired girl” to do housekeeping. When Jim goes off to college, Antonia stays, and even so they easily pick up where they left off when they reconnect almost a decade later.

There's not much of a traditional story structure here. It's presented as an adult Jim's recollections of his friend, so it takes a loose and kind of winding way of presenting its narrative. I didn't take much issue with that, since the book is pretty short, honestly, and not super textually rich so it's not like it gets bogged down for the lack of standard-issue “rising action”. Where I found myself losing interest was in the last third or so of the book, in which the lively Antonia largely vanishes and we're left mostly with Jim, who is pretty boring and whose straightforward path doesn't have any real tension. We see the world of the novel through Jim's eyes, but it's Antonia who gives it its animating force. I'd argue that Cather's strength isn't so much her prose, which didn't do much for me, but her characterizations. She imbues even relatively minor characters, like Otto the hired farmhand, or Antonia's mother, or fellow young immigrant woman Lena, with a verve that makes them memorable. Too bad she couldn't do the same for her ostensible main character.

I will say that I'm glad this book was something I read as an adult instead of in high school. Teenage me would have HATED it because it's kind of boring, and while adult me would agree on the boring part, I was able to bring more life experience to bear that improved the reading of it, for me. I'm able to appreciate the way a significant friendship can loom large in your nostalgic reflections of childhood, and the hesitancy you can feel about reaching out even when you really want to reconnect. And one thing I did really enjoy and think still is criminally underrepresented in literature is the depiction of a genuine mixed gender friendship. As someone who's had strong, completely nonromantic friendships with men that I've really cherished, I feel like so often you only see those depicted as part of a family relationship or one of the two parties is gay, like there has to be some obstacle to “explain” why a man and a woman who enjoy spending time with each other would not want to sleep together. To see an actual friendship between a boy and a girl depicted as just that, in a novel published literally a century ago, is refreshing.

Dave Eggers had an extremely rough go of it in his early 20s. He lost both of his parents, to cancer, one just about a month after the other, when he was only a senior in college. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers recounts those deaths and his subsequent guardianship of his 8 year-old brother, Toph. The Eggers brothers leave their Illinois home behind and move to the Bay Area, in part to stay close to their older sister Beth, and in part for career opportunities for Dave as he tries to get a new magazine, Might, off the ground while also trying to figure out how to raise a child.

Before I even picked this book up, I was aware that it seems to inspire strong feelings. Some people HATE it and some people think it's magnificent. How you will receive this book depends entirely on how you feel about Eggers' writing. If you think his stream-of-consciousness, wildly tangential, constantly-on-the-verge-of-a-panic-attack style of narrative is great, you'll think this book is amazing. If, however, you want a straightforward, relatively linear narrative, you will think this is the worst thing you've ever read.

It feels beside the point to talk about story structure, because there isn't really any (it's very hard to tell how fast time is passing and there aren't really narrative beats to speak of), or character development, because there isn't really any of that either. Even for a memoir, a sense of story and character tend to be important, but neither is a priority for Eggers. While I'm usually fairly open to nontraditional narrative, this book is 100% style over substance. The most compelling part, for me, was the relationship between Dave and Toph, and Dave wrestling with both his fierce love and concern for his brother and his acknowledged resentment of being prematurely thrust into a parental role. However, I mostly found it tiresome. It held my attention inconsistently at best, I was usually bored long before a particular side riff was over. Eggers' flaw isn't that he's wildly self-absorbed (I think memoir is an inherently self-absorbed form since it's literally assuming that your own life is so compelling that other people want to read about it), but that he's not nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I wouldn't tear it out of anyone's hands and I can understand why some people really respond to it. I just didn't.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, there's a basic proposition that seems to be taken as a fundamental tenet. In any male-female pair bond, the two halves have diametrically opposed interests. Men, in an effort to spread their DNA as widely as possible, are interested in multiple casual affairs, and are most threatened by physical infidelity, because it might mean they are duped into spending their resources on what are actually the offspring of other men. Women, on the other hand, have to invest heavily in each of their children because the energy-intensive gestation and feeding of infants falls to them. They want relationships that last so that they're able to ensure the best environment for their kids, and are most threatened by emotional infidelity, because it might lure away their partner for good. In Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and his co-author, Cacilda Jetha, critically examine these ideas by looking at the behavior of our nearest animal relatives to come to an entirely different conclusion.

The way Ryan and Jetha see it, humans are naturally polyamorous and best served in a group where sex is exchanged frequently and without possession or jealousy. They make the point that while researchers searching for the roots of human behavior often compare humans to chimpanzees because of the closeness of the genetic relationship, we're equally as closely related to bonobos, who have much different social structures. They look to these and other members of the ape family as they compare and contrast things like vaginal position, common copulatory positions, size and shape of the male reproductive organs, and female vocalizations during intercourse (and more) in an effort to determine how human sexuality has actually evolved over time and what it means for society today.

This book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I thought they made some good arguments, but the language often got a little jokey informal trying-to-be-cool. Either you're trying to make a serious argument or you're trying to write a book aiming at a pretty low common denominator to get more sales, and this seemed like it was trying to be both. It's possible to write about important concepts in an accessible way, I just wrote about how well Silent Spring did that exact thing, but this doesn't hit the mark. I also thought they came off a little one-sided in their highlighting of the few examples of cultures that don't subscribe to the monogamous or polygamous models, portraying them as nearly utopian. The reality is that for most people in most cultures in modern history, marriages are between one man and one woman with the expectation of exclusivity. That hasn't always worked well in practice, but it's likely that even members of cultures that don't follow the mainstream experience unhappiness and strife in their personal relationships. More frustratingly, they don't really present a solution beyond “burn it all down and start over”. It's an interesting look at the other side of evolutionary psychology, if you enjoy that sort of thing, but I wouldn't recommend it widely or whole-heartedly.

In Saint Augustine's Confessions, he recounts his journey from being a young atheist living large and looking for answers with his intellect, to his eventual conversion to Christianity through the efforts of his mother, and the peace and security he found in his faith.

I found this book interesting more theoretically than in actuality. Although I'm not a believer, stories about faith (particularly people who came to faith rather than just continuing to believe what they have been taught since they were children) are intriguing...what makes a person decide to believe or renew a belief they had drifted away from? I suspect most of them would describe it the way that Augustine does, as a realization of a truth that they'd been looking for, consciously or unconsciously, throughout their lives. But the environment that produces that realization can vary...sometimes friends and family are involved, sometimes it's an intensely personal experience, sometimes it comes out of the blue, and sometimes right after a major life event that shifted perspective in a significant way.

I didn't realize until I'd already started it that the Kindle copy of the book that I was working with was an abridged edition. I'm not sure if that was a positive or a negative, honestly. While the book never really engaged me until the end, when Augustine gets more analytical about his beliefs, and I was therefore rather happy that there wasn't more of it to get through, perhaps that's because a more developed narrative would have been more compelling all along? I can't honestly say. I didn't personally enjoy reading this particular edition and wouldn't recommend it for a general audience, but for an audience curious and inclined to enjoy books about religion, this would be a worthwhile read.

Leaving one's area of origin, and the emotional impact of doing so, is at the heart of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. I thought it was a novel when I picked it out for my Kindle, but it's not: it's a collection of four short stories on a common theme. The first two stories are fairly short and deal with men displaced in Europe as a result of their Jewish heritage during World War 2, and the second two are longer and deal with transnational migrations, with one story having no apparent connection to Jewishness and the second being the most explicitly tied to the Holocaust of all four of them, as well as being the only story primarily based in a female perspective.

All of the stories end in tragedy, and only one is told even in part as a first-person narrative. It gives the book a sense of remove, and the beauty of Sebald's language makes it feel like almost like an elegy in prose form. The power of loss and memory is gorgeously and movingly conveyed...every one of these stories gently rips your heart out. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy short stories, I found that this was a very well-done collection of them. There aren't too many, and they are all arranged around a similar theme in a way that really works and keeps the stories flowing together and seeming like one piece. Like four movements to a piece of music. I would definitely recommend it, but maybe if you're not in a low mood already, because as lovely as it is, it's a downer.

I quite like watching football, particularly college football, but it's become harder in recent years to enjoy the sport in the wake of the research about the damage done to the brain by playing the game. I was really interested in reading more about how that research came to be, but this was mostly a miss for me. It's as much an uncritical biography of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who made the discovery of the tangles in the brain that result from multiple concussions, as it is a science story. I wanted much more of the latter and less of the former.

This account of the Revolutionary War era based on the lives of the women (wives and mothers, usually) of the Founding Fathers was interesting enough but never actually compelling. I did learn more about what a crap husband Ben Franklin was (extremely) and was introduced to Eliza Pinckney, who was genuinely fascinating, but the reality is that there are few enough documents by these women in their own words that the ones for whom the most exist, like Abigail Adams, dominate the narrative.

The Crack in Space posits our world about 2080 (which, at the time it was published, would have been over 100 years in the future): there is severe overpopulation, to the extent that many young people are choosing to be cryogenically frozen until the labor market is better. It's an election year, and there's a black presidential nominee for the first time ever. That nominee, Jim Briskin, is struggling in his campaign until he's tipped off about some major news: there's been a rift discovered to a whole new world...one that looks like it will support human life. Briskin seizes on this development to announce that it will be his platform to thaw out the frozen and give them this world to settle, and his opponent jockeys to match his promises, when it's revealed that the new world is populated after all, but not by people as we know them. Instead it's Peking man that survived. So now what?

That's maybe half the plot of this slim volume (it's about 200 pages long), but it's the main one. First of all, let me say that I'm glad that we beat out Dick's predictions and had our first black president 75 years ahead of schedule. Moving on from that, though, what I really enjoy about reading Dick's work is that he poses interesting, thoughtful questions rooted in an understanding of human nature. As much as we might think that if we discovered a parallel Earth we'd learn from our past and thoughtfully go about exploration and potential colonization, the reality is that in an election year, politicians would be falling all over each other to posture and secure an important position for themselves. If the world's population was so huge that abortion wasn't just widespread but encouraged, that people were freezing themselves in hopes of a better life someday, it would absolutely end up with people getting sent through the door/portal/whatever without much in the way of an actual plan while news cameras flashed and the powers that be congratulated themselves on a job well done. Maybe I'm a little cynical (I was a litigator and now I'm a lobbyist, so that probably comes with the territory), but I feel like Dick gets how people would actually behave instead of how they'd prefer to imagine they would. I found it a quick and enjoyable read which had me pondering alternate realities.

This book uses a dual-timelines structure to tell a story about Andy, who is a grown adult lady when we meet her, with a fancy job and disposable income. She gets a sudden call from the mother of her childhood best friend, Peter, whom she's mostly grown apart from over the years, to ask for her help in finding him, as he's disappeared. And then we meet teenage Andy, as she recalls a summer in her late teens when she, Peter, Andy's boyfriend Marcus, and their sweet, artistic friend Em spent time hanging around an abandoned manor house in their rural English hometown. This Andy is half-feral, her alcoholic mother having neglected her through much of her childhood. The book tacks back and forth between these two timelines, one in which adult Andy searches for Peter and the second in which teenage Andy and her friends meet David, who appears out of nowhere at the manor one day. He's their same age, and the group spends the summer playing a game in which they hide fake diamonds around the manor for the others to find, inspired by an actual theft of a diamond necklace at that manor in its glory days, but nothing good can last. Sounds intriguing, right? Alas, this book has so many issues. First and foremost is the completely bananas pacing. Virtually nothing happens for the entire first half of the book, it's all setup. I'm a character-focused reader, so I don't usually mind if “nothing happens”. But the characters don't work either. They feel very thinly sketched, and then we get to the back half and not only does the plot start hurtling forward frantically, the character moments feel like they're trying to cash checks that were never actually written. Very little about the relationship of the characters to each other makes any sense, in either timeline. The prose is fine, a little on the flowery side, which feels almost jarring because it's swinging for these moments of insight and clarity that the book never really earns or even seems to be earnestly seeking. It's so messy that it's hard to identify just one or two things that might have made a positive difference. A big mess.

This book was slim but packed an outsize emotional wallop. It's a sweet, wistful story about a pair of young men, Ellis and Michael, growing up in Oxford, and the bond between them that shifts as they grow up and their circumstances change, and how Ellis winds up alone in his 30s. It's all character development, very little in the way of plot, which tend to be the books that work best for me. The prose is simple but poignant. It doesn't use quotation marks to set off dialogue, which some readers find irritating but I found worked just fine in context. I really really loved it, it was beautiful and heartwarming and heartbreaking.

The titular painter in this historical fiction novel is Thomas Gainsborough...if you think you don't know his work, you've probably seen Blue Boy. He also painted his daughters, Molly and Peggy, and they are, of course, the focus here. Peggy is the younger, by a year, but even as a young girl she feels a sense of obligation to her sister, who has episodes where she seems to forget who and where she is. Peggy is terrified her beloved Molly will end up in a madhouse and devises a system to keep Molly's condition hidden. This becomes more challenging when the family moves to Bath and the girls become teenagers. After a betrayal when they're in their 20s, Polly finds herself questioning everything she's done and struggling to figure out how to proceed. We also get some peeks into the life of Meg, a different girl living in a different time, whose story does eventually intersect with the main plot line but not until quite late in the proceedings. I found myself drawn into this book quickly, the voice Emily Howes creates for Polly is incredibly compelling. The love and fear she has for her sister, the anxiety she feels about keeping anyone from understanding the depths of Molly's issues, the way she sublimates that anxiety into feeling like she has to be good are all convincingly rendered. Polly feels like a girl, then an adolescent, then a woman. Since I'm a character reader, this went a long way towards making the book work as well as it did. The biggest issue for me was the Meg storyline. I understand why she included it, but I resented every time it pulled me out of the main narrative in which I'd otherwise been engaged. This is a very promising debut and I'm excited to read more from Howes!

I want people to like me. My friends (obviously), people at work, the people reading this. I'm pretty sure I should be embarrassed by how much it matters to me what people think, but it does matter all the same. The older I get, the more I'm okay with the idea that since some people aren't really my cup of tea, it's fair that I'm not everyone's cup of tea either. But that means that I'm okay with about 2% of people not liking me, maybe 3% as a worst-case scenario. Everyone else, I'm going to go ahead and need your approval.

Which is why I was intrigued enough by the title of this book to put it on my to-read list, even though comedian essay/memoir isn't the end of the reading pool I do more than lightly dip my toes in very often. Faith Salie's Approval Junkie chronicles her lifelong pursuit of other people's regard, from her childhood acting career, to her determination to win her high school's Miss Aphrodite crown, to trying to build a career as an actress in Hollywood, her relationship with her first husband, her divorce, remarriage, and eventual family life with children. Her writing voice is strong, sure, and entertaining, and she doesn't just go for funny (although when she does, her chapter about trying to win over Bill O'Reilly is a highlight). She also hits pathos, describing her difficulties dealing with the death of her mother when she was 26 and her struggle to conceive a child; as well as life advice, in her chapter about how to conduct an interview/genuinely listen to other people.

At the end of the day, I remembered why I don't usually read these kind of books unless they're by people I already love, like Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey. Even with their books, I find myself smirking wryly rather than actually laughing out loud. It's really hard to be laugh out loud funny in print...the only comedy book I can actually remember triggering more than the occasional light chuckle was My Horizontal Life. I'm not super into Chelsea Handler, but that book was hysterical. Salie's book is pretty decent, but not up to the Kaling/Fey level. On the whole it's more funny than not, and it's entertaining if not particularly memorable. I'd recommend this for a slightly older crowd...a lot of its humor deals with divorce, fertility treatments, and childrearing. While it can certainly be appreciated by people who haven't had those experiences (like me), I feel like it would be most enjoyable for people who can relate better.

Rod Jones' The Mothers is set in Australia over the course of several generations. It begins with Alma, who gets pregnant young and rushes into marriage with a man she barely knows. By the time their second child is a toddler, the couple is estranged, and when her husband brings home his paramour, Alma flees. She has nowhere to go, but is taken in by a young man about her age and his mother, who he still lives with. The two eventually conceive a child of their own, but he doesn't want to marry her and cuts off his support of their daughter, Molly, abruptly during her youth. Broke and desperate, Alma sends Molly to live in an orphanage for a time, but eventually reclaims her...and her father makes a surprise reappearance in her life. Molly grows up and makes a good marriage of her own, but finds herself unable to get pregnant.

Meanwhile, Anna is a teenage mother sent a religious home for unwed mothers, where she is convinced to give up her baby son for adoption despite her desperate desire to keep him. That son is adopted by Molly and named David, and spoiled as Molly tries to work through her own complicated childhood legacy. David, in turn, grows up to get his girlfriend Caroline pregnant, and even though he stays with her, he doesn't exactly do right by her. When David's older and has established his family, he wants to meet his birth mother, and she has complicated feelings about a reunion.

This book is hard to write about because there's not a lot there. The themes he riffs on, of the difficult choices women have to make around motherhood and the way mothers raise their children playing out in how they deal with their own parenthood, aren't new, and he doesn't do anything special with them. It does strike me as strange that this book was written by a man...the emotional costs of motherhood seem like a topic much more germane to a female experience. Not that it's written poorly or with a hamhanded treatment of the subject...it's fine if completely unremarkable, for the most part, but it made me wonder about Jones' own feelings about his mother. Was he raised in an environment where he became particularly empathetic towards women's stories, or does he have a more complicated relationship with mother figures in his life that he's trying to work out? Psych 101-ing someone based on one piece of writing is a completely futile endeavor, but his subject and treatment of it are unusual enough that it elicits the question, anyway.